What are the Risks and Danger of Dental Tourism?

Dental tourism, also called dental holidays in Thailand, is a subset of the sector known as medical tourism. It involves individuals seeking dental care outside their local healthcare systems and may be accompanied by a holiday. Dental tourism is growing worldwide. As the world becomes ever more interdependent and competitive, technique, material, and technological advances spread rapidly, allowing providers in developing countries to provide dental care at significant cost savings when compared to their peers in the developed world.

Why Dental Tourism?

While dental tourists may travel for a variety of reasons, their choices are usually driven by price considerations, and while medical tourism is often generalized to travel from high-income countries to low-cost developing economies, other factors can influence a decision to travel, including differences between the funding of public healthcare or general access to healthcare.

Dental tourists travel chiefly to take advantage of lower prices. Reasons forlower prices are many. Dentists outside the “developed world” are able to take advantage of much lower fixed costs, lower labour costs, less government intervention, lower education fees and expenses, and lower insurance costs. Much of the bureaucratic red-tape that engulfs businesses in the developed world is eliminated abroad, and dentists are free to focus on their trade, dentistry.

Risk of Dental Tourism?

The flip-side of this is the lack of follow up after complex treatment, andless legal recourse for patients when something goes wrong, but the result is that procedure, such as Dental Implants and Porcelain Veneers, which are simply financially out of reach for many people in the developed world, are made affordable overseas.

Consideration for Dental Tourism?

Similarly, since procedures often require multiple steps or subsequent checkups, the patient may have to return to the same doctor for those reasons. Typically, a patient takes two trips to have Dental Implants. The first trip is to set the base and the provisional crown. The second trip is typically four to six months later after the Dental Implant has stabilised in the bone. One Day Dental Implants are not recommended for dental tourists due to the higher failure rate of the system, so to find out more about dental implants,

So before you decide to get dental work done overseas please seek advice from your local dentist beforehand to ensure things aren’t going to be a problem. To BOOK in for a cosultation please click here!